Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovator
Podcast. Our guest today is
Robert Bjarnason,
the co-founder of the Citizen Foundation and
many other things,
but I think you will tell
us something about this in this episode.
Thank you for being here. Thanks for inviting
me.
As a first question,
what is the Citizen Foundation and
how did you start it?
The Citizen Foundation is a nonprofit.
We're actually two nonprofits.
One is registered in Iceland and
also one is American in the US.
It started in 2008. I was
actually living in London
at the time when
the financial crisis hit Iceland.
Iceland was a pretty vulnerable victim, and
over a period of time, all
the news was about Iceland
being bankrupt and so on.
You know, going by taxi
in London,
talking to the taxi drivers,
"Are you from Iceland? So unlucky,
your country is bankrupt."
Well, actually it didn't turn
out really that bad in the
end, but at the
time it was an overwhelming feeling
in Iceland where
trust in government and parliament
plummeted down to six percent.
This is one of the oldest parliaments
in the world, founded in the year
930, so like over
a thousand years old. Over a
thousand years of pretty good trust
in the parliament, but it plummeted
from sixty-seventy percent to
six percent in two weeks.
Then it was just overwhelming -
this idea that we weren't really
in control over what's going on anymore.
It was certainly in Iceland,
but also in wider society
in the rest of the world,
at least the Western world
like in the UK where I was.
So we had this idea -
this group of people,
mainly my partner and I
who started the first internet service company
in Iceland in 1993,
plus some other people from our network.
We had this idea to start
a civic tech nonprofit to
help create technology to enable better decision
making in society between governments and
citizens. We've always been using a lot
of open source software
and promoting and creating open source software.
The basic idea was:
how can we enable, by using
technology, the internet, and AI and other things -
how can we help governments
and citizens make better decisions in an
increasingly complicated world?
I was wondering, when you had
the idea that technology could help
people make better decisions -
you mentioned 2008, but you also said
that you opened an internet provider.
Was that also connected to
the idea that the internet could bring
more discussions?
Yeah, absolutely. I was twenty-one when
I started the internet company in '93.
The internet existed since 1987 really -
the text-based internet - but then the
web came and we started this
internet company.
There was a lot of idealism about how
this increased communication could give people
a stronger voice in society
and even in a utopian way,
how the internet and cyberspace could really
transform social power structures
and make society fairer and more equal.
So yes, I was definitely a
part of that. That's also why we
started that internet company.
I'd been helping schools connect to the
internet. I was at the Teachers
University, and I
downloaded the first web browser called Mosaic.
I'd been on the text-based internet
for years,
and I tested it and was like,
"Wow, this is the future."
We actually downloaded the first
public Linux operating system called Slackware
on floppy disks. That was all
for free - Linux, you know.
We set up telephone lines
in my friend's living room.
So I'd always been interested in
using all this open source software as well.
So the idea in 2008 -
opposed to this idea of
the internet - I mean, the internet was not really
delivering. Yes, it's given a lot of people
voice, but when it comes to actually giving people
a voice that can influence decision making,
there was almost none.
But also, just in
general, how open source
community-based things can really work.
Linux showed that, the internet
showed that you can actually have grassroots open source
solutions that really make big changes
in society. That's also the reason why we
decided that since we're going to be
working with citizen engagement to build
up trust, we couldn't be a
for-profit company. We had to be
a nonprofit organization because
otherwise we wouldn't have the right
alignments.
In your opinion, is the internet
still a space of freedom, or
can it also be a space of surveillance
in some way?
I think the internet is still a
place of freedom in a way,
but it's also basically a place of surveillance.
There are different types of
surveillance in different places of the world.
In some places it's highly
monitored and not really free at
all for free thought.
But I think the internet, like everything else,
just reflects the society
that it's embedded in.
So what are the
main solutions that you propose to
this distrust that is missing regarding
classic democratic systems -
Western democratic systems?
When we started, we felt like,
"Okay, so how can we use the internet?"
We started thinking very quickly about
e-democracy, collective intelligence.
There were quite a few people -
academics and others - trying different things.
The basic idea is
that if you have a
complicated decision, and in the modern world
we have increasingly complicated decisions
with competing demands -
what is considered a good decision today
maybe is not exactly the same as
twenty years ago. The world is
evolving, it's not static.
The idea is if you're doing
a complicated decision or decision-making process
that's going to affect a lot of people,
then actually by reaching out
at the right time when you're creating the
policy to citizens to actually get
information - this basic principle is
that we're going to make better decisions
with better information.
I think few people
can argue against that - it's
even mathematically proven that
more information is going to give you
better decisions.
That's the core of the
idea - the utilitarian part.
But obviously there's also the democratic
angle of it. What makes a good
democratic decision is something that is going to
be balancing the competing interests
of the voters and the people who
are living in a society that
the rule or regulation or law
or decision affects.
This can be small things
like participatory budgeting - are we going to put
a playground there or an
outdoor hiking park? There are lots of
good examples of participatory budgeting
all around Europe and the
world. But also policy
like educational policy, traffic policies -
all sorts of policies where you have many
different stakeholders.
For example, the Scottish Parliament, where
the platform and this idea is embedded into
the committee system of the Scottish Parliament.
They've been doing really groundbreaking
work, leading the world in many ways
when it comes to engagement.
They have an engagement
unit and they take it very seriously,
very professionally. They offer
a service to the different committees
to say, "Oh yeah, we have this issue,
do you need information from the people,
from the public, before you take this decision?"
And then the committees say, "Oh yes, we need
information on X, Y, and Z,"
and then that gets
implemented. It's like a way of
actually delivering real
value to the elected
representatives in the committees by getting
good information to them.
This is used quite many
times. It's just examples of how
this kind of engagement can
both lead to better decisions
but also
help empower people democratically
because they can influence the decisions
themselves by taking part.
I was thinking - so now
we have representative democracy.
Do you think that in the future
with this kind of deliberative
tools like participatory budgeting
and all these new tools that maybe use AI,
we could have some different kind
of political system? Maybe without
representatives, maybe still with some
representatives or professional politicians?
Obviously anything is possible
in the future, but I think
democracy, law, and everything -
how it all connects together,
the norms that people are used
to - there are all sorts of different
things that need to change
together for some really major changes
to the system.
One of the things that we've been very much
against in our work for
seventeen years since we started this is
direct democracy. We have
taken clear stances that there are
lots of decisions where direct democracy
can't work today.
I think that's one of the things -
this idea of proxy voting, for example,
where you delegate your vote to certain
parliamentarians. There are issues with direct democracy.
We have referendums obviously,
and Switzerland is obviously famous for that,
but we have taken this stance
against direct democracy for several reasons.
One is security -
how secure are you doing it online?
We're lucky here in Iceland,
and also Estonia and some other Baltic countries,
where a lot of people have
electronic IDs that enable any
type of direct democracy.
But if you don't have reliable
electronic IDs, you shouldn't be doing
direct democracy where people vote on insecure platforms
about something important, because
that's going to totally undermine
democracy. It's going to create distrust
in democracy if people are voting
on platforms that are not secure.
That already limits lots of
places from really doing any
reliable direct democracy.
But we also draw the line
at participatory budgeting things
where people are voting for priorities.
In Better Reykjavik - our main project
that's been running in the city of Reykjavik
for fifteen years now -
people have a chance to put forward
ideas about what to do
in their neighborhoods. Seventeen hundred ideas
came in a couple of years ago.
Six months later, the city
looked at them, professionals costed them,
and then people can vote with
their electronic IDs on what ideas
are going to be implemented in the
neighborhoods. But if it was about
policy, then we have a
totally different dimension where
the power actually lies.
The thing is that the
power in online things is
controlled by who knows about it
and how you control who knows about it.
You do that through social media,
and how do you control who sees what
on social media? You pay for it.
So basically
anything you do online
for direct democracy - we're voting on this
issue or that way - for us
is not in line with our values.
We always recommend against it because
even if you have electronic IDs,
if it was a controversial issue
and it's all online,
it's just too easy to
manipulate. That's just the problem
of referendums in general - referendums
can go all sorts of different ways
recently, as we've seen.
But having said that,
I think what we can see
in the future is that
AI is going to help empower
the organizational side of
governments because often the reason
why there isn't participation is because
of lack of resources and
lack of planning capabilities to actually incorporate
the feedback. I think AI
is really going to empower that
part - it's going to increase the capacity
of government to actually
work through good decision making
exponentially, not just in the
next two years.
But then also with AI,
it's going to help empower
citizens. For example, with
doing a new iteration of Better Reykjavik
later this year - we have over forty thousand
registered users - we're going to have
an AI system that is going
to allow people to have
an AI agent that's basically going to be
watching out for their interests in the
city. Depending on the
subjects they're interested in,
it's going to be like your agent
watching out for your interests.
I think both of
those aspects - both in terms
of more capacity for governments
and also more help for citizens -
that's going to really help with the quality
and quantity of citizens
working with government and AI for better
decisions.
I was thinking about power
and information. If I don't have
information, I also don't have the
power to choose to do A or
B. Then there is this question
about the lack of participation -
if people don't have the information,
they can't actually participate.
If they had
information about a certain person,
maybe that person could see about
changing something in the neighborhood where
they live. I think this is a
cultural problem related to
education, because maybe in school
we are not taught
about how we should participate
and how it is important.
Absolutely. One of the things
that we've done over the years is
that especially after mobile phones
became popular like in 2013,
2014, 2015, when everybody
had smartphones, was to lower
the barrier to participation
both through technology and
design. For example,
when you are
visiting a civic project on the Scottish Parliament
or something, the first thing you see
is a nice image, then
there's a very short description of what
to expect, and then
you can see more through a
"read more" button. It has a very
simple user interface which we also have
designed for deliberation.
Instead of when people see
an idea asking them to
comment on it, we ask them to
help us out - help us
find the pros and cons.
We ask them to help us find the best
arguments. I think that's an
issue - people need enough
information, but also how
the information is presented to them
and at what level you break down
information. For example, we did this
with the government thinking about constitutional
changes in Iceland. We worked
with them on a Better Reykjavik platform
where they basically had to
break down the constitution into
parts - like four different things they wanted to
change. You could have put a
big PDF with all the legal text
and asked people to give comments,
but we knew that would never work.
So what we did on our platform was
create pages where you have
the three top-level topics in
very short text. You click on
each one and then there are four things
that the government wanted to do in the constitution
connected to each topic - very clear,
almost lowering the barriers
so almost everybody could understand it.
That simple change, compared to
the PDF with the actual law proposal -
that's like a barrier that
ninety percent of people can't deal with.
We lowered it so that ninety percent
of people can process it because
it's been broken down like that.
That's really important. But I think
when it comes to the
information part itself, I think
AI is already helping people
who are using ChatGPT or
Claude or whatever. It's both
doing searching for you, it knows your preferences,
it's like on your side in a way.
If you get a
subscription to ChatGPT, at least now
it has no advertisers, it's just you
and the model, so in theory
it's going to be on your side,
knowing your preferences.
What we're doing with our
AI agent for Better Reykjavik
for your priorities is that
it's not just looking out for your interests
in the city, but we are actually going to
build it in an open source way
where you can use open source models,
building it in a way where
you can basically tell
the model, "Those are my
interests and the things in the city,
my needs - I'm a parent,
I have those children with those abilities,
I have a car," whatever.
Then the AI will help you
find the information.
I think about not having the information -
if you go back thirty years ago,
you had some people who
would read all the newspapers every day
and have all the information,
and some people who didn't read
papers at all and
wouldn't be up to date on anything.
But today it's totally different -
information is coming from everywhere,
some of it is true, some not.
So having the information has changed
a lot because there's just so much information.
I think AI is the solution to help
us deal with that by
understanding your priorities.
Is Your Priorities the
main platform that you're working on?
But before asking you about it,
would you like to share something
about your professional background -
academic, but whatever?
Very short on my
academic record, but I
started - my father's an electrical engineer
and my mother's a doctor.
My father was early into computers,
and I guess I was
hyperactive, so he got me programming
at nine. I had a computer
called the Oric-1 microprocessor -
it was like a training computer for kids.
I got interested and really
spent all my energy on it.
I sold my first piece of software
in 1984 - a teletext
information booking system that would
scroll information. It was
used by the national government
for meteor strike information in
1984. I sold my
first game program in 1987
in a programming language called Prolog -
an expert system. Then I
took a break from computers.
I was involved in seven
feature films,
spent a year as a substitute lighting
director for the opera,
club promotion, putting on raves,
things like that. But then
I got back into it.
I was at the education
network, which was a pioneering
internet network for teachers,
helping connect schools to the
internet. That was when I saw
at the Teachers University the
Mosaic browser, and we
started this ISP.
In '95, I started the
first of two ISPs
in Denmark. Then I was
mostly traveling between there
and San Francisco where I
was working at a video game company.
I met some great people,
including my brother.
Then I got into really exciting
technology back then - chat bots.
In 2001, I met Lynne Hershman,
who had just done a movie
called Teknolust. She came
to me and said, "Hey, can you put
her on a Palm Pilot?" So we
did that. It was actually an exhibition
in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
for a year. People
could beam the chat bot
into their Palm Pilot using infrared light.
Then I moved to London
after the dot-com crash,
worked on video games,
mobile phone games, and many other things.
At thirty-six, I decided to
take a break from the video
game industry and start a fintech
company working with hedge funds
and trading platforms.
At that point in 2008,
when this financial crisis happened,
frankly if I had still been
in the video game industry,
I probably wouldn't have started the Citizen Foundation.
But being in the financial world
gave me the opportunity to
make money so I could start the foundation
myself. Also, this idea -
if I can use technology
and AI to help rich people
make more money, why can't I
also use technology to make
society better and use technology
for good? Since then it's been
the Citizen Foundation for seventeen years.
We developed Your Priorities
very early on. We also
started a collective intelligence
AI platform three years ago
and started to work with
Northeastern University's Center for Social Impact.
We've been using AI and
large language models since 2019,
so I've been living in the
AI world for a long time.
The capabilities of what AI
now has have been growing really fast
the past five years,
so we've been slowly
transforming all our platforms
to be AI-first.
I read that you also
started a pirate radio?
Yeah, that's because my
father's a ham radio operator.
When I was seven or eight,
I convinced my father to
let me use his FM
transmitter with my cassette player
and a little microphone.
I had my cassettes - I
thought I was doing like a favor
with a five hundred meter or
one kilometer radius where all
my friends were listening in their cars.
I was playing awesome music
of the time. This was back
in 1979 or something,
a long time ago.
I was thinking - 2008 was
a significant year because of
the crisis, but Bitcoin was
born in 2008. There is
a lot of speculation behind Bitcoin,
but also some ideology.
What are your thoughts about
Bitcoin or blockchain?
To be honest, I've
never really got into it.
I've stayed away from that.
Every time people have asked me
to support liquid democracy
or whatever using blockchain,
I've stayed away from that.
I like the ideology - this
early internet, cyberspace stuff
where we can actually create
other power structures that are
more fair. I like that,
but it hasn't really happened
like that. It hasn't really
been of any use for
at least what I'm doing.
I think it's a good idea,
but I just haven't seen
any applications that have convinced me.
Because even though there's this
decentralization thing - once again,
it's proven that yes,
in theory you can have it
be untraceable and decentralized,
but then humans are humans
and they're going to use exchanges
all over the place. There are
ways of looking at and
knowing what's going on.
Even criminals, I guess,
but it's not really fulfilling
the original promise - or not
the promise, but the original things
people projected on it.
Humans are humans - I think
that's a key phrase.
The humans that are
using Your Priorities - are they using it
for which kind of
uses? Can you share maybe some
use cases?
So basically, most of the
use is when there
is a project going on.
For example, right now there's
a consultation with the Scottish
Parliament about ADHD - Attention
Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
They started like a couple
of weeks ago, already got
like seven hundred responses.
It's anonymous. Thousands of people
have come to learn about it -
they advertise it somewhere else
and people come and participate.
In a city context,
there's collecting feedback
on a new traffic policy,
collecting ideas. We have
this feature called deliberation -
a debate solution where we
really manage to encourage people
to find the best arguments.
Back in 2009 when we
did our first pilot with
the Shadow Parliament in Iceland,
we used a regular
commenting system like on
YouTube or Facebook - just
like a thread of comments.
In the first evening of
the platform about some policy,
we had these people in
a horrible personal argument
on the first evening.
We lost the platform users -
they were going at each
other personally.
I was looking at it like,
"Oh, this is not going
to work." But what we
came up with - we got
inspiration from parliamentary debates
and other university debate
structures. Also my experience
in the video game industry
is that
when you are building
a user experience like a
website or an app,
one secret is that you
are really in control of
the experience. When you have
a computer game, the player
thinks they're in control,
and they are to an extent,
but it's mainly the game
developer who controls exactly
what the experience is going to be.
The same applies to any
digital platform.
So I had this idea -
lots of people play video games
and think about how to
run the game. Could it
be an idea to mix
video games with participation
and debates, where people are
actually debating about the problems
of our society?
Absolutely. I think
gamification - when you take
small game elements -
but we also have this idea
for an actual game.
Instead of just asking for comments,
by having people help us
find the best arguments
in a project,
we get people putting both
pros and cons,
where the same person writes
both. There's almost never
any arguments just by
changing into this new
structure of design.
Also, you can't comment directly
on somebody's point - you have to
do a counterpoint. That's worked
really well for our
partners like the Scottish Parliament -
they couldn't deal with it
if it was just arguments
all the time.
But gamification can go a long
way. We actually have
an idea we call
the Community Challenge.
We actually applied to Google.org,
though we couldn't get that through.
But basically it's an idea
where governments or civil society
can put forward challenges
in the city or in a country,
and then a team of human
players with AI agents work together
to solve the problem.
They take different roles -
it's like a role-playing game.
There's a journalist role,
an investigator role - different roles.
It's set up like a game,
but it actually has real
issues behind it.
What's going to enable it to work
is the AI agents.
The agents are going to be
able to keep things from going wrong,
they're going to be able to
do the complicated things,
do lots of research,
process information, and
do all the fact-checking.
That's actually an idea we
have on the table,
but it would cost like a
million dollars or something to develop,
so one day maybe.
I was thinking related to
institutions - a platform like
the one you are
describing, how easy or
hard is it to explain
to an institution, to a politician,
this innovative platform?
I don't think it
is hard to explain in terms
of how it works.
It's very simple to use.
For example, in Iceland
we have forty thousand
registered users in Reykjavik,
but totally ninety thousand
registered users in the
whole country because they have
fifty-plus pilots using it.
So like one-third of the
country knows the platform,
including the politicians.
Many people have used it.
That's a bit of a special
situation here in Iceland
in terms of how many people
have used this open source platform
specifically. But it's really about
does it serve a need?
That's what we need to
convince the politicians about.
But it's not enough to
convince the politicians because
you also have to set it up
so the layers of
bureaucracy that need to
respond to it are going to work
there. Any policy decision
involves a very complicated
interplay between different levels -
on the city level but also
on the parliamentary level in
terms of lawyers, regulations,
and different levels of
bureaucracy. So you need to
have a practical plan
that's going to make the
participation work on the bureaucratic
level. One of the things
that often kills most
participation processes is budget -
budget money. That's the
reason why we
started very early on
with Your Priorities and our policy is
that if you don't have money,
you don't need to pay for it.
It's a volunteer thing
since we're a nonprofit.
We've done many of
the most successful Your Priorities projects
where they didn't pay anything.
We got around that "Oh no,
we have to find money for this" -
well, it's free.
That's one thing. For
most modern politicians -
smart people working in
municipalities and governments -
most of them already
think it's a good idea
to get more information
to make better decisions.
So it's usually not a lot
of convincing to do
or explanation of how it works,
but it's just everything else -
all the complications that
result in
participation not happening.
I'd like to share something
about your organization in
relation to your team -
what kind of skills,
and maybe how was it created?
Where are you searching for people?
It started basically -
it's always been like a
small group of people.
It's mostly been like five
or something in different roles.
For seven years,
I took no salaries
from the foundation.
We've gotten grants
from the EU and
from all over the place,
but it's always been
like a passion project.
So several people have
come and gone. Recently
with me, we've had
Joshua and my partner Robert,
plus my son Alex
and some others.
It's been like a few people around -
mostly friends and family
type of thing. When
you don't have dependable salaries
to offer, that's usually how you
get people to help,
but that is also great
in many cases.
Obviously it's been a lot
on the technology side -
most of the technological development.
We partner with, for example,
Northeastern University Center for Social Impact.
Beth Noveck has been
leading those research processes.
We partnered with her from
2013 to 2019.
Also the Scottish Parliament
and many others.
We are just bringing the
technology component.
That's our domain or
scope, if you like.
We don't offer the
service of going somewhere
and setting up a democracy project
for somebody. We have
partners for that from
Democratic Society from Brussels
and in-touch.org,
European Citizen Action Service.
That's how we've been -
lean, family, friends oriented,
but with a lot of partners
that help us scale up the work.
I was curious about
the projects that you are
working on or that you worked on.
If you would like to share something?
So really exciting project -
I'm actually going to be presenting
in San Francisco in
August at the opening
with this as part of
the Future of Work program
of the GitLab Foundation.
GitLab is a software
development security company,
and they have this foundation.
We were one of the projects
that got funded last year.
This is with Northeastern University
where we're using AI
and agents to help states
identify jobs that are
requiring university degrees but
really should be skill-based.
So this is the idea
of the problem being that
there are jobs that
go unfilled often, and
maybe some of them have
too high education requirements.
So we use AI to help
states optimize that process.
This has been a
really interesting project.
I think that's where you can see
in many places this idea
of using AI for good.
If nobody is funding it
and it's not profitable enough
to have that focus,
it's really important for society
to keep funding nonprofit ideas.
Another interesting project
from earlier in the year -
we worked with Northeastern University
and the state of New Jersey
where they are
doing research on the job
market - what effect will AI
generally have on the
job market in New Jersey?
They have this AI task force
in New Jersey.
What we helped them with
is that we first identified
the root causes of the problems -
what are the root causes
of disruption of AI in New Jersey?
We did this using our
open source tools to do
large-scale web research
looking at thousands of
documents, plus interviews,
to look for everything recent people have been
talking about regarding the
effect that AI will have on jobs.
Then we had a curated
list of two hundred
AI impacts or potential
root causes of problems
that people might face.
We put this into voting
by the public using a tool
called All Our Ideas,
which we also developed,
where we asked people what's
going to be the greatest impact
of the next five years
of generative AI.
Then people vote in a
pairwise manner, and we got
seventy thousand votes.
Some of the top items
were things like privacy issues -
people are concerned about privacy rights.
Then we did a second stage
where we actually used
AI also to help us
come up with solutions to
some of the problems.
It's a very classic example
of many of the projects
we've done in the past
where we are mixing together
AI research, then
engagement of people at
different stages, and then
we also use AI also
to help us find solutions.
Other projects you're excited
about - could be a project
you worked on or maybe
a project of someone else
that is interesting?
I think in general there
are many people
looking at how to
use AI for good.
I think that sort of
in general, the category
of projects is that
the promise of AI
to do good for society
is at least as powerful
as the potential bad things
AI can do for society.
The thing is that
if we don't have the
imagination to actually think
about projects to do good,
then the bad things will happen.
I think we've missed this
with social media.
I was talking about this
for years - how social media,
which we saw quite early on,
had the potential for some
bad influences on society,
on mental health and stuff.
It just went on and on,
and this idea came
that we can regulate
social media with rules.
Because we can't just
stop the bad things happening
with this technology,
we've been promoting
and are generally promoting
that yes, obviously you want
to stop the bad things,
but you also have to
do good things.
You have to have
positive ideas and things.
You can't just try to
stop the bad because
you're going to fail quite badly.
You also have to do positive things.
I think that's so important
when it comes to democracy projects -
we have this amazing opportunity
now with AI.
Just like with programming,
I can do things now
literally ten times faster
programming-wise with agents
than I could two years ago.
Ten times faster - that
is like ten of me
two years ago.
Think about that.
If people are having
interesting ideas for projects
to do something for democracy,
the barrier to entry
is so much lower.
So maybe a bit of
a long answer to your question,
but the projects that
I'm excited about are
the new projects that
listeners are going to be
working on for this purpose.
To reply in some way
to your question,
I have this feeling that
software now is not
so important - I mean,
it is important, but
before you had to
have a team of maybe
ten developers, and now
just one person could
be enough.
I can feel that
in some years, maybe
also my mother who
is not a developer,
maybe she will be able
to talk to ChatGPT
or Google something
and create an application.
So what is important now
in the civic tech field?
After it's not so
important to build a
platform that is well designed -
I would say we humans
should still be the
designers, or could AI
also have this role?
What AI does is
that it empowers people
with agency that need
to want to do something.
So if you have this
need to want to do
something good,
now it's easier than ever in
terms of just using
AI to do things you want
and empower you and
a small team,
one person, two people.
You're absolutely right - for sure.
We are the same - we're
a bit behind the curve
on programming and stuff,
but it's getting there soon.
And that's also like
with software - software
is like a means
to do something.
The software is just
there to achieve some
sort of goal.
But I think we're
already seeing that
in the job market
where with programmers
in general, there aren't
as many openings,
but there was a lot
of growth during COVID
and a lot of people
put everything into digital solutions.
Now big companies have
been laying people off
like Microsoft let nine
thousand people go.
There's this sort of
interesting situation where
people are getting let go,
and you know, "Start
your own startup" and
stuff like that.
That's great if
they have that drive.
But I think there's
also a huge scope
for people to do
things in the civic
tech world and civil
society that aren't going
to make big dollars
but are going to
make things better for people,
make democracy better,
or whatever.
These can have huge
rewards if you're going
to do something like
that and you're successful
at it.
Even if you're not
successful, it is still
highly rewarding.
Obviously pursuing startup
money and everything -
that's absolutely fine,
I've been there myself.
But I'm just saying
with this age of
AI and lower barriers
to entry, I'm hoping
also that
how resources and money
and everything is distributed
is going to change.
But what matters is
agency and creating real
value, and there are
so many things you
can do with creating
real value in civic
tech and with democracy
that could really make
people's life better.
Looking for meaning,
looking for purpose -
that's definitely for some people
going to be a great
path forward.
Do you have anything
you're working on that
you have some problem
to fix, so
you will need some help?
All the time.
There are both software
problems and other problems -
all sorts of issues.
One of the great
things about this part
of working in the nonprofit
civic tech world
is that there are
often conferences, meetings,
common projects, and so on
where you get a sense
of understanding the human
aspects of all of it.
If you're just with
your head in the code,
you also need to understand
the human aspects of it.
But now
with AI today,
if I have a complicated
programming problem,
I have several options.
I sometimes put the
same question into ChatGPT,
Gemini, and Claude -
I call it like
my AI council.
Also, ChatGPT's
OpenAI programming assistant -
when I get bug
reports or want a
new feature, I
used to put it
in a task management system,
but now most of
them go straight into
ChatGPT's agent.
Instead of putting
it on a list for later,
I just put it straight
in and say "fix this,"
and then it just
does the feature or
fixes the bug for me.
Yeah, we hope
that continues.
You were talking before
about the community of
civic tech, people
volunteering or working
in the civic tech field.
Do you have any
message for them?
Because sometimes there are
people that have another
side problem - finding
funding for their project.
They really believe in
an idea that can
make the world a better place,
let's say.
My message is
that there's been this
transformation, especially when
it comes to civic
tech specifically -
we have already been
transformed in terms
of how much capacity
increase we can have
on a small team
using AI.
I also think on
the funding side,
in the next few years
when people realize -
when we see so
much of our work...
I consider myself a programmer.
I've been a programmer
since 1981.
I have really worked
hard at it, practiced
a lot, become really
good in my field.
I've put in
hundreds of thousands
of hours of practicing.
This is what humans
do - we practice.
But now I
have access to
AI that is almost
as smart as me.
The next generation will
be much smarter.
That's sort of -
I think my
worth and value
is a bit difficult
to think about just
because these neural
networks are in a
way taking my job.
But I think
the value and what
you can do in society
is going to change
totally when we see
knowledge-type of work
being so highly automated.
There are going to be
new things we can't
imagine yet.
I think funding for
making society better -
I think that's definitely
one of the positive
potential outcomes we
can get out of this.
We basically have
two scenarios: we have
a scenario where we
have like thirty percent
unemployment and corporations
control everything, but we
also potentially have
a positive scenario where
we have like a
three-day work week
and plenty of resources
for doing projects
connected to society
because there's so much
value created.
If you do anything
that actually helps
facilitate better things,
that has value.
There are so many
things in society
that are under-invested
in because of how
capitalism works in
the world,
mostly in the US.
This is much better
in traditional civil
society being well-funded
in Europe, not so
much in Iceland.
But at least that's
my belief - that
we're going to start
to really look at
what's going on around this,
what is important,
and when we see
things that used
to be very expensive -
like programming -
plummet to almost zero,
I think we're going
to see more clearly
what is important.
I think there are
a lot of opportunities
for people to
tackle civic tech,
democracy, and so on.
Thank you, Robert.
Would you like to
say something more?
For me it was
great to thank you
for having me on here,
and I'm sure we'll
speak again.
Absolutely.
Thank you.